Entries in Strategic Petroleum Reserve
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Jessica McGowan/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich attacked the president’s plan to release 30 million barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, calling it a shortsighted strategy, which could ultimately damage and shorten its ability to supply oil.

“Releasing and refilling, releasing and refilling is a very short term strategy because those caverns were designed only to be refilled six times. After that you actually ruin the cavern because you’ve bleached out the salt,” Gingrich said on CNBC’s Squawk Box Friday morning. “It’s a technical part of the development of the strategic petroleum reserve actually designed to stop politicians from capriciously using it to manipulate the market.”

The former speaker of the House pushed Obama to drop regulations in the Gulf and encourage companies to return to former drilling projects which they’ve abandoned.

To stress his view that the president’s proposal is faulty, Gingrich likened Obama’s energy policy to the glimmer of a new age car created by aliens.

“The problem with liberalism is all of its ideas are terrific as long as they don’t happen,” Gingrich said. “Wouldn’t you love to be in a brand new, magic vehicle invented by Martians, which uses no energy, lasts forever and is terrific? Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist, but that’s the president’s energy policy.”

Gingrich has marveled at the opportunities available in outer space before. At the Republican debate in New Hampshire last week, he said “I'm a big fan of going into space,” and stressed the need to decentralize the space program.

“If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles,” Gingrich said at the debate June 13. “Instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure.”